Liar, Lunatic or Lord

2 Corinthians 11:4  You happily put up with whatever anyone tells you, even if they preach a different Jesus than the one we preach, or a different kind of Spirit than the one you received, or a different kind of gospel than the one you believed.

As a pastor, I have had people come to me with all kinds of weird spiritual theories. One theory I heard was that Jesus was not really the son of God, he was just a really good guy. Wrong!

C.S. Lewis put it best in his incredible book, Mere Christianity, “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.”

The idea that we can follow some of Jesus’ teachings and ignore the hard ones, or look at his words as just good ideas to live by is ludicrous. You have to accept Jesus as a liar, a lunatic, or Lord. Jesus isn’t a potluck where you get to eat the fried chicken and skip the kale salad. You either accept Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the Living God, or you reject him totally. There is no middle ground.

It is time for us to embrace the Jesus of the Bible, not some fairy tale idea of Jesus. Read the Gospel of John to find out who Jesus really was, and is. Then make your decision.

Today’s Readings: 1 Samuel 11,12; 1 Chronicles 1; 2 Corinthians 11